All ePublications

Members of the local churches have written many responses to criticisms of the teaching of Witness Lee and of the local churches. These responses address vital issues of truth concerning God, Christ, His salvation, and the church, among many other subjects.

In 2007 an open letter appeared on the Internet calling on Living Stream Ministry and the local churches to “disavow and cease to publish” certain statements by Witness Lee. The two books in the series A Defense of the Gospel: Responses to an Open Letter from “Christian Scholars and Ministry Leaders” (1) and 2 answer the concerns raised in that 2007 open letter and show the defects in its handling of important biblical truths.

Voices of Confirmation contains the testimonies of leading evangelicals who, through direct study and contact, have come to appreciate the local churches and the ministry of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee.

This 2011 book is one of a series of four addressing criticisms by Norman Geisler and Ron Rhodes. This book addresses various aspects their mistreatment of Witness Lee’s critique of the deviations of organized Christianity from the biblical revelation, including:

Misrepresentation of Witness Lee’s critique of the system of Christianity as an attack on Christians;

Misrepresentation of Witness Lee’s critique of the Roman Catholic Church; and

This 2011 book is one of a series of four addressing criticisms by Norman Geisler and Ron Rhodes. This book addresses three areas in which they have borne false witness related to our appeals to the courts for relief from libel:

their accusation that the local churches are litigious;

their claim that the local churches drove Spiritual Counterfeits Project into bankruptcy; and

their misrepresentation of many aspects of the case over the Encyclopedia of Cults and New Religions.

Brothers, Hear Our Defense is a series of four books correcting many errors in an article by Norman Geisler and Ron Rhodes. The subjects that these books deal with—the authority of the Bible, the incarnation of Christ, the nature of God, the state of Christendom measured against the Bible—are important matters deserving consideration by all serious Christians.

This 2009 book contains a statement prepared by the LSM editorial section addressing key issues in dialogues with a panel of Fuller Theological Seminary professors regarding the Trinity, the Person of Christ, God’s full salvation, and the genuine ground of oneness. It also contains a copy of the Fuller panel’s conclusions from their study.

This 2008 book contains statements from Hank Hanegraaff, President of Christian Research Institute; Gretchen Passantino, director of Answers in Action; and Fuller Theological Seminary that attest to the orthodoxy of the teaching and practice of the local churches.

The Experts Speak contains the testimony of six expert witnesses who studied the local churches and the teaching of Witness Lee. Five of them testified in court in the Lee v. Duddy; the sixth was not asked to testify at the trial but wrote a statement titled “Libel and the First Amendment.”

The “Meet the Experts” section of The Experts Speak gives basic profiles of the six experts who studied the local churches and the teachings of Witness Lee for the Lee et al v. Duddy et al case concerning The God-Men.

Dr. J. Gordon Melton, Director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion and author of the standard work Encyclopedia of American Religions, testified that SCP had completely misrepresented Witness Lee and the local churches and had made many false and damaging accusations in its book The God-Men. [Note: Dr. Melton is currently Distinguished Professor of American Religious History at the Institute for Studies of Religion, Baylor University.]

Dr. John A. Saliba, a Jesuit priest and Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Detroit-Mercy, testified that SCP adhered to a principle of attacking and destroying anyone with whom they did not agree and that the accusations of cultic behaviors made in The God-Men were false as regards the local churches and the teachings of Witness Lee.

Dr. Eugene Van Ness Goetchius, formerly Professor of Biblical Languages in both the Episcopal Theological School and Philadelphia Divinity School, testified that The God-Men intentionally misrepresented Witness Lee’s teachings on the authority of the Bible and morality and that the members of the local churches were “extremely family-oriented.”

Dr. Rodney Stark, Professor of Sociology and Comparative Religion at the University of Washington and co-author of the model of conversion that Neil Duddy claimed to have used to perform a sociological evaluation of the local churches, testified that Duddy had missed the model’s entire point and had altered it maliciously. [Note: Dr. Stark is currently Co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion and Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University.]

Dr. H. Newton Malony, Senior Professor of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, conducted a study of local church members to assess the claims of sociological deviance made in The God-Men. He found those claims to be without basis. [Note: Dr. Malony retired from Fuller in 2009.]

Dr. Edwin S. Gaustad, formerly Emeritus Professor of History at University of California, Riverside, wrote a statement criticizing self-appointed vigilante groups such as SCP and the damage they cause to the reforming impetus inherent in Christianity.

After the end of The God-Men case (Lee v. Duddy) in 1985, Dr. J. Gordon Melton, one of the expert witnesses in the case, wrote and published An Open Letter Concerning the Local Church, Witness Lee and The God-Men Controversy. Dr. Melton demonstrated conclusively that The God-Men had misrepresented Witness Lee teaching and recommended that it, and any other writing based on it, be discarded.